Jane Mayer, The Dark Side

Sigh.

Or maybe it's more properly, "Ugh!"

At last, though, I'm finished reading Jane Mayer's, The Dark Side. And I say that not because it was a bad book -- not at all -- but rather because it is such a good book. So thoroughly and unremittingly effective in what it sets out to do: detail how we, the United States, has become a state that uses torture.

That's it.

That's bad enough. For me. And difficult enough to wrap my head around -- and impossible to accept in any real terms. That's my failing.

There is a point in the book that Mayer discusses the sense in which on paper many of the techniques described -- stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, sensory deprivation (or overload), humiliation, etc -- don't seem like much, don't seem to rise to the level of torture individually. And yet the cumulative effect, stacking one such practice on top of another, can brutalize.

And it dawned on me then why this was proving so hard for me to read: Mayer never stops. It's one case after another, one brutalization following the last, in all its gory detail of pulverized flesh and furtive masturbation and hooded beatings and... Despite reservations within the government and military, despite court rulings, the apparatus keeps pushing on, removing players, revisiting and revising legal rulings so that our agents can continue. At some point I just wanted her to stop. To spare me the details.

She never does. Because there's been no end to it. Still.

Ugh.

Sigh.

Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem 19.1 (September 2008)

Almost without fail, I tear into a Hummingbird when it arrives.

Okay, perhaps that's an unfortunate choice of words. A little gruesome that, and perhaps a little too... active? passionate? frenetic? a description of my relationship with the journal. It's much more like I curl up and read through. Usually once but sometimes twice (perhaps at some remove).

It's a quiet, sometimes far too earnest, but always pleasant time. The best issues have a few short pieces that strike just the right chord -- with me, with the season. with... something.

Art Stein's "The Poet" is just such a piece:

Her
attempts
to plagiarise
God
have not
gone well
lately

Marvelous.

Charles Bukowski, Dangling in the Tournefortia

Bukowski or Chiasson? Chiasson or Bukowski? Dangling in the Tournefortia or Natural History?

I went with the safe pick. The known. What felt easy, for the last weekend of summer. Bukowski.

Perhaps known too well. I won't say that I was bored by Dangling, but... There was nothing gripping here. Nothing new. Of course, it could be argued that there's little "new" in Bukowski as we step from collection to collection -- I'm willing to own that as much as the fact that it might have been... well... just me that failed in the reading. Wrong time. Bored with the prospect of heading off to the track, hammering away at the typer, hammering away at my liver and my lungs.

First published in 1981, it sits roughly in the middle of his living production (the sheer volume of posthumous collections makes his oeuvre exceptionally top-heavy; the Tupac of the poetry world). So maybe he was tired. Maybe he was bored.

Or maybe it's all just a crap-shoot and we can't analyze these things too much. I'll stop trying. And I know I'll read more Bukowski. When he does grab me, he's an awful lot of fun...

Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin

I'm not sure what to make of Blood Kin. Or rather, I'm not sure what I make of Dovey's novel.

No doubt it is, in no small part, because I have a hankering after a strong sense of place. And Blood Kin exists in that netherworld reminiscent of Coetzee's work (to whom she has been compared -- it's rather an obvious parallel to draw, not the least because of her own personal geography; Coetzee also provides a blurb for the jacket). No blame in that.

And the novel works. A bit fantastic; more broadly fantastic than Coetzee's work, which to my thinking is so effective because it takes that ethereal No-Place and grounds it so thoroughly and starkly in one individual. Dovey's work weaves together six narrators. It works. For the most part.

Part of my quest for place is rooted in the fact of it being summer -- and my hankering after our own, my own, American South -- and my continuing search for a sense of South Africa (draw your own conclusions). I wouldn't say I expected it in Dovey, but I had half a mind looking for hints of it.

Ah, but it's a new day, and I'm getting old; I should yield more freely to the gifts of the young.

I will be interested to read what comes next. I suppose a short story in The New Yorker is inevitable -- following in the footsteps of other arguably African Next Big Things (Adichie and Akpan come immediately to mind).

In the meantime, you can read a review of Blood Kin in the New York Times, listen to an interview on NPR, peruse her website, and view some video of her on YouTube -- on her book, on power, and on beauty; as well as a reading or two.

The cover, by the way, is about as striking a cover as I've seen in a long while. It just looks good on the shelf.

Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy

Hobsbawm's On Empire is a rather pedestrian presentation of the tottering, unstable American empire; an "empire" deserving of the quotes, unlike any that has gone before (because it exists in a world unlike any that has gone before). In very simplistic terms, then, it seems to me that the history Hobsbawm presents -- more often than not in glancing comparisons to the past British empire -- is of limited use for anything other than setting off how the times are so very different.

Ah, but what is history "for" after all... Lordy, it's too early.

In setting off the times and the American "empire" from others that have gone before he succeeds rather well. There are, too, touchstones that Hobsbawm returns to time and again that bear keeping in mind: that inter-state wars have largely fallen by the wayside, that armed conflict tends to be on a smaller scale, yet its impacts on civilian populations has magnified; that there is no territorial underpinning to the American "empire," it being instead largely a matter of force projection than territorial coherence, or even incoherence (and thus, any pax Americana is necessarily an attempt to impose or keep the peace without, whereas in the past -- for instance, pax Britannia -- it has referred to a peace the within the empire, albeit a peace that has been aided by peace without).

But not surprisingly for a book of collected addresses, it doesn't quite hold together. Nor, I suppose, should it be assumed that it will. Too bad, on the whole; though not a bad read. It has left me with a few things to think about... if no great insights.

Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet

Back to one of the old stand-bys. Bukowski.

I find it impossible to "date" his work -- early? late? somewhere in-between? It all seems in-between: between worlds, times, memories, moments. And that's probably the great draw. In fact, I'm sure of it. Feed the inner-rebel, the angry young man, and yet maintain a bit of the dilettante sensibility: sleep with whores and go home to Mahler; get drunk and fight and go home to the typer and hammer out a bit on Dostoyevsky.

But there's something a little different about Bone Palace Ballet. Not on the whole. But he writes of his daughter and far more of his wife than I can remember in previous books. ("In previous books" only in the order of my reading -- "in other books".) And of his age -- though there is less surrender than simply the fact in it.

And he does have perhaps the most unblinking assessment of wannabe writers I have read anywhere:

"the weak"

are always proclaiming that
they are now going to concentrate
on their work, which is usually
painting or writing,
it is known, of course, that they have
talent, they simply haven't... well...

And on he goes. Oh my... ouch. Truly. True. For some? For most? For many? For me?

For me? No. I hope. Still. Ouch.

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet: My Life as a Doggerelist

I've always really enjoyed Trillin's work. While I haven't read any of his food books (for which he is widely... known? published?), I developed a taste for his memoirs and reportage (of which the most recent that I've seen is "The Color of Blood" and "Capital Fellows" -- in issues of The New Yorker from the past months) and thoroughly enjoyed his novel, Tepper Isn't Going Out.

I never was one for his "Deadline Poet" schtick, and I don't think it's just because of my own pretensions as a poet. I don't, for that matter, think my pretensions have much to do with it. It just... Well, I didn't think his "doggerel" (his word; I'd probably use, in my pretension, "light verse") was all that funny.

But I was at a poetry reading with a friend, was looking for something light, saw Trillin's Deadline Poet sitting by the elbow of the arm that held the hand which held my head as I half paid attention and half reflected on the pretensions of these other poets, and thought: what the hell, I like his stories.

Ugh. Nothing.

It's not just the (Trillin-tagged) gray, bland quality of the Bush I years (around which most of the book and Trillin's doggerel revolves) but there's just nothing to it all. The core -- the verse -- never much appealed to me but I suppose I expected or hoped the stories around it all to redeem. John Sununu? C. Boyden Gray? Early Clinton (Bill)?

I don't know, maybe I've become too earnest. But it left me cold. At least it's finished. And on we go.

Yasmina Reza, Dawn, Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy

It's been far too long. And I have felt the lack. Not of reading -- I have managed to keep up with that, though not nearly as much as I would have liked (and I have certainly been feeling out of sorts for it, for the lack of concentrated, focused time, pushing through) -- but rather of finishing. Of staying with one book and reading through.

Maybe even being compelled to push through with that singular focus.

A number of books started and slowly hacking away at. For me, no way to read. But there it is for the moment.

But I did finish one yesterday. Bought as a treat, with a coupon, from Borders, on the first evening of my sister and niece's visit here to Madison: Yasmina Reza's Dawn, Dusk or Night.

I first read Reza when her play Art made its splash. Then stumbled across her Adam Haberberg. While I enjoyed Haberberg (though if I am remembering correctly, "enjoy" isn't quite the appropriate word...) I loved Art. Never seen the latter performed, much to my chagrin.

Dawn, Dusk or Night was on my wish list because of Reza, because of what I'd read of its style and quality of reportage, and because I have a soft spot in my heart (and perhaps my head too) for France.

It is an intriguing work -- and disturbing. It is not at all a flattering portrait of Sarkozy. It is not, for that matter, a straight-forward portrait. "Evocative" is a descriptor that has, I am sure, been used far too frequently. But Reza dances around this man; her prose approaches, grabs, captures, paints around, and dances away.

And Sarkozy ends up looking like almost every other politician you've ever read of. Or imagined.

Yet nonetheless he is given what is, to me, the most affecting line in the entire book, and not one you'd expect in a portrait of an electoral campaign:

"When you start qualifying love, it stops being love." (138)

Indeed.

Ouch.

Sarnath Banerjee, The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers

I stumbled across The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers last weekend while browsing the "graphic novel" (comics?) shelves in Borders. Part of the draw, I suppose, was the memory of some Satyajit Ray films I saw last fall. And enjoyed.

The story of Barn Owl -- such as there is (since there's really not just one story) -- is interesting enough, and a bit of a history lesson, such as it is. I enjoyed it certainly.

The drawing is a bit pedestrian. Pleasant, but not spectacular or particularly innovative. Banerjee does, though, employ an interesting technique in places: a photograph as background with a drawn character placed in the scene. To rather striking effect.

Banerjee's website is a bit of a disappointment but I will keep an eye out for other works by him.

Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

I seem to have found my way to reading stories of old men at the end of their lives, stories written by younger men (some much younger if Wodicka's book jacket photo is any indication) cutting right to the bone.

Or maybe it's just what I imagine to be the bone.

Cutting nonetheless.

Another excellent book, All Shall be Well... Perhaps not as deeply, profoundly affecting as Out Stealing Horses but only, perhaps only because it is far more of a rollic at times, especially early in the book, than Stealing ever is (or tries to be). It's a bit shaking, in fact, how much fun the early chapters are, to be followed with the very moving and very difficult mid-section, when the narrator, Burt Hecker, an old man with a disfigured nose and broken family life, looks back.

It is so interesting, but the brief reviews I've read make it seem so bloodless (talk of Burt as a medieval re-enactor, folk musicians, his family lawyer, etc & et al) -- all of which are there, are a part, and a substantial part, but written out in a review sapped of all their power and play. And yet I make my way to the New York Times review of the book, one of the longer reviews, and I disagree: "the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes “All Shall Be Well” such a Black Death of a chore to read"?

Really?!? Not for me.

But maybe I just have an artless, wordy, underarticulated soul...

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

Good lord, I have seen the future -- and certainly if my reaction is any measure, at least substantial echoes of the present -- and it is in Trond Sander, the narrator of Petterson's Out Stealing Horses.

It's still so fresh and, because of the power of it -- the understated power of it (is this a Scandinavian trait? I'm sure there are plenty who might ascribe it thus) -- raw... But that doesn't really do it proper justice. I actually started this book a week ago? Two? But have delayed, time and again for the past 4 or 5 days (I pick up the newspaper, I turn on the television, I fall asleep reading The New Yorker -- almost anything but pick up the book), in part because I don't think I want it to end, in part because it rubs up against so much.

Not unpleasantly. But achingly. Quietly. Like an anticipated fever.

It has won prizes and gotten laudatory reviews elsewhere -- including in the New York Times -- that can speak to the specifics far better than I. Not only is it surprisingly emotionally powerful; the characters -- lightly sketched -- are amazingly vivid; and the story -- or rather the telling of the story -- is ingeniously and masterfully structured.

And I can only hope that Trond is right, echoing his father at the close of the book, that "we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt."

Boy, oh boy, have I made some lousy decisions; but some good and proper ones too. Kiss.

Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers

There is nothing shocking in Fred Kaplan's Daydream Believers. Nothing that will make you slap your head and exclaim "Now I understand!" (though I did want to slap my head any number of times and exclaim "You must be kidding me!!").

But it is a lucid, engaging, and to my mind fairly well-balanced review of how we got into the mess we're in.

And by "mess we're in" I do not mean -- nor does Kaplan mean -- just Iraq.

Rather, Kaplan stretches back, back, back to Truman (though only briefly) and works his way up, exploring how various ideas, both grand and not so grand, concerning how the United States could and should approach the world and global security challenges were put into practice through the years. And resulted in an over-stretched and under-resourced military, a foreign policy that has left us more isolated than we need to be, and money pouring into projects that have little bearing on the threats this country does face.

It's a smooth read, avoiding much of the repetition that comes with books born out of stories written for other outlets (which Kaplan notes though is quick to point out that this is not a collection of previously written pieces), filled with lots of detail that I was not aware of (and names of "obscure" figures -- and names that recur and made me thing, "huh?" until I realized that it didn't really matter whether I remembered just exactly what everybody did at every step of the way), and tying together neatly, and not at all as a patchwork, the various players in the current drama.

It is astounding how all of the pieces fit together (and how all of the players owe and are owed by the others); and it is almost laughable, at points, how so many of the folks Kaplan discusses have just sort of stumbled through their work and into positions of greater and greater responsibility (which they were unprepared for and/or sometimes just willfully ignorant of with regard to the impact they could and would have).

Almost laughable, if it weren't so deadly serious.

JM Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

JM Coetzee is one of those "can't miss" authors for me. Or has been. Until now. Even books I haven't really known what to make of going into them, or worried I'd be utterly bored -- such as Elizabeth Costello or The Master of Petersburg or The Lives of Animals -- have, in the end, in the reading, gripped, shaped, shaken, excited, or just left me thinking. Deep.

Until Diary of a Bad Year that is.

Maybe it's the gimmicky split level narrative. Maybe... Oh, hell, I don't know. It's gotten plenty of laudatory reviews: from Book Forum, the New York Times and elsewhere (including a rather more thorough reflection in Slate).

So take their word for it. Not mine. Coetzee's always worth reading (and apparently worth discussing, formally, as the Penguin Reading Guide illustrates). Just don't read this one first. You'll miss all the real good stuff.

Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem 18.2 (March 2008)

Ah yes, another Hummingbird arrived earlier today. Fitting considering the time of year. Though not quite; not at these latitudes.

Always such a pleasure to flip through it though this time around nothing outstanding. Nothing distinguishing. Other than the little magazine's return from the dead.

So still, as ever, pleased with it's arrival and happy to have spent the time with it. Something akin to eating a roll of Smarties.

Dean Young, Skid

I had a hankering for a bit of surrealism. Albeit at some remove from the banal but occasionally... surreal is too dramatic a term for those moments in life... "surprising"?... And connected, where I could connect. Unlike the Simic I had read many years ago that just seemed like so much word play (and not very fun at that). So...

Start again.

I had a hankering for a bit of surrealism and found it in Dean Young's Skid.

I wasn't swept away by the collection, but I never am -- with either verse or prose -- when I enter into it expecting anything, let alone to be carried on. And somehow, for some reason -- seduced by the cover blurbs perhaps, by something I read online of his other collections -- I was expecting the world. Instead I found little crystals.

When young, fall in and out of love like a window
that is open and only about a foot off the ground.
Occasionally land in lilacs
or roses if you must
but remember, the roses
have been landed in many times.

"Whale Watch" (40)

And...

There was my famous use of humor
that Jordan said was the avoidance of emotion.

"Even Funnier Looking Now" (81)

But isn't that all we can hope to find, are lucky to find? Crystals that speak to us in the moment?

What a good horse he is...

Christopher Hope, My Mother's Lovers

Back to South Africa.

I've really enjoyed the books of Christopher Hope's that I've read. I haven't read a lot of them -- the most egregious gap being the seminal, A Separate Development -- but I've always been engaged and entertained. And they've compelled me to think. Less about the book (which I am too busy enjoying) than about the world around me, and the world he evokes.

My Mother's Lovers is no different. It is an acerbic, pointed portrayal not just of the "new" South Africa but of the role, place, and imagination of whites in Africa more generally. I was, for the most part, thinking as much as I was enjoying -- and loving both. Through a long stretch of the book, at least.

Somewhere about the middle of the book, though, it starts to teeter on a May-December romance which never quite breaks to the banal but threatens to. And the ending is almost Coetzeean in its easy acceptance (among the characters) of the reality of what, on the surface at least, is an almost absurd swapping out of identities.

I probably should, and have erased a number of sweeping characterizations about the book being "well worth the read" because such are trite and not really all that instructive. Tastes differ, after all; and I am sure -- to read the back cover blurbs is enough to confirm this -- that others will engage this book in a very different way than I did. But this is a book that I could fairly easily work up a conference paper around (or, at least with it and the issues raised at the paper's center), and be happy doing so: rereading and mulling it all over, that is.

Tony Hoagland, Hard Rain

Tony Hoagland has to be one of the smartest, unabashed poets working in the English language today. I haven't loved everything he's written, but then that would just be weird.

Hard Rain is a great, short piece of work -- a chapbook of delight.

If I were a better poet -- hell, if I were a poet -- I could have written and dedicated "Visitation" to my past love ("I kneel and weep a little there") while "Dialectical Materialism" is the closest thing to an ode to globalization (that works) that I've read.

Talk about a crazy range; despite "how difficult it is // to be both skillful and sincere". Hoagland succeeds, I'm convinced, because he leavens both with skepticism and clear-eyed self-awareness, tapping his and our own doubts about what it is that makes up our poetry and our lives, writ both large and small.

Shorter, indeed, but more consistent (easier to do? but surely only just...) than What Narcissism Means to Me -- the first I read of Hoagland and the collection that drew me into his verse -- I have a feeling I will return to Hard Rain over the coming years. Happily, not regretfully, so.

Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: The Poet's Eye

As much as it pains me to write this, The Art of Attention was a misery.

It has been awhile since I really felt like I had to slog through a book, but this was surely one. Perhaps this is mere pretense on my part -- not recognizing how often artists (and everyone) does this, day to day -- but it's almost unseemly how Revell uses his own poetry in the latter half of the book to illustrate his points.

Whatever they might happen to be. And I'm not sure what they are.

As best I can tell, Revell holds to the mystical notion that poetry springs from... mystery. Or rather: Mystery. I wouldn't disagree, but it's hard to get a whole book out of such. Hence, perhaps, his reliance on self-consumption... and regurgitation.

It's like listening to a particularly earnest and ecstatic executive chef (and an insufferably self-focused one at that) -- say, for Applebees -- wax "lyrical" and obtusely over the marvel of souffles.

To Revell's credit, he does not trumpet himself as master -- it is not nearly so gross as that -- but there is an unsettling egotism to the entire book.

All that said, there are some interesting bits: reminding the reader of Wallace Stevens' admonition that "being there together is enough" and Revell's own assertion that "Composition is taxidermy." And there's this little gem of an exercise:

"Sometimes I like to ask my students to translate one of their own poems into a nonexistent language of their own invention." (71)

That strikes a masterful note. Noteworthy, unfortunately, for how it stands out among the clanging, tiresome rest.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America

Quick, quick as it's time for me to fly. Or actually drive. But this last little bit I've been engaged reading about Amerigo Vespucci. Judicious, engaging, balanced (if rather critical of Vespucci, Columbus, and the lot of the early European explorers of the "New World"), Amerigo succeeds in sketching the man, from limited sources (very limited sources), and the world he lived, worked, explored (to some extent), and puffed himself up in.

Vespucci, it turns out, was sort of a shit. But as Fernández-Armesto points out, most of "them" were. The book, however, isn't.

Tenaya Darlington, Madame Deluxe

My god, almost two weeks since I finished anything of substance?!? Maybe that's why I'm feeling so funky. That's funky in a bad way, not in the Madame Deluxe way.

But the read itself was enjoyable... enough? No, that's damning by faint praise. Not everything worked (as you would expect) but I suppose, for me, that the "failures" -- those passages and pieces that don't quite connect -- are more glaring in poetry than in prose. Certainly than in novels, where the scope and expanse of the narrative (and the sheer weight of the words) tends to sweep through and over the infelicities. In the very engaging works, at least.

But even the most engaging poetry collection isn't enough to swamp the failures. Which is not to say that there are failures in Tenaya Darlington's Madame Deluxe -- certainly none that have stuck with me.

These are poems with an edge and a spice mildly reminiscent of perhaps the greatest (to my mind) book-length poem of all time: Suzy Zeus Gets Organized. A bit more holistically playful than Suzy Zeus, and certainly more poetically, formally "inventive" (Darlington is at play with the words and forms deployed -- and they are "deployed", quite consciously, or so the collection reads).

Her "The Student Asks the Poet Basho: What is Victoria's Secret?" is one of the great examples of the above. It could have become too cloying, too clever, and far too obvious. It's none of those.

And it is all very much worth the time it takes to read.